Employee Schedule Templates — Get Your Managers Out of the Office and Onto the Floor

Alan Thurston

Scheduling is a necessary part of your workweek. It is time consuming, but when you take the time to create schedule templates you will save yourself effort later.

Each week, you need to enter shifts into the schedule, even when the shifts are virtually the same week after week. However, you know that there’s hardly any such thing as a normal week. There are always vacations, holidays, or other variables that prevent weeks from being normal. When you work with templates, those “normal” weeks are easily handled, and the minor changes are managed with minimal keystrokes.

Scheduling software lets managers get out of the office and onto the floor, where they can do what they do best – manage a thriving business. When used properly, templates minimize the routine, data-entry aspects of scheduling and free up time to think strategically when it comes to designing shifts.

Schedule Templates

Setting up a template schedule is a snap. In fact, it only takes about as much time to create a template as it does to create a single weekly schedule. Once you create that template, all you need to do is tweak your schedule to reflect current needs and employee availability.

Templates allow you to define certain shifts with capacity requirements. In a restaurant, for instance, your dinner shift requirements change through the week. Therefore, you can set your needs for each day of the week. If you are working with numbers from previous years, you can adjust your templates months in advance.

With the time you save in eliminating routine data-entry tasks, you can use your templates to create winning strategies. For instance, when you head into a busy season, you will have schedule templates ready to roll out.

Monitor Time Worked

Your staff may be comprised of part-time and full-time employees. In order to comply with company policies and government regulations, it is important to avoid exceeding certain limits regarding hours worked. When you create your schedule template, you can ensure that you are not surpassing those limits. Then, if your time & attendance software is configured correctly, as the week progresses, you will receive notifications when employees come close to breaching their individual hourly limits. When each employee is defined in the schedule template, the software will do the hard work for you.

You can also have notifications sent to your employees. Upon clocking in or out, they will be alerted if their hours verge on exceeding their allotted maximums. This provides an extra layer of accountability in the system. After all, if you are busy on the floor you might not recall that one of your part-timers is in danger of exceeding her weekly hours. She will let you know and you can act accordingly.

Team Empowerment

Gone are the old days when employees wrote their availability on the back of a receipt and then hoped that you didn’t lose it. Now, employees can use their dashboard to let you know their availability weeks in advance of a vacation or other event. The system will let you know not to schedule them for those shifts.

Your team can also receive notifications when they clock-in or out. You might need to let everyone know about a special meeting for the entire team, or you might need to fill a few shifts. Employees can respond to these messages through the software. This way, you don’t have to take any time out of your day to discuss these scheduling details.

Work Smart

When you learn to fully exploit the features in your scheduling software, you’ll find that you save time in the long run. You’ll stop wasting time and energy with a lot of inefficient discussions over minor scheduling details, juggling everyone’s availability, or even entering the schedule for a normal week.

Further, your employees will love being able to communicate their needs quickly and efficiently. After all, administrative items such as the work schedule shouldn’t be a huge time-consuming headache. You have a business to run.

Advanced Employee Schedule Templates with stratustime

Staffing for busy periods, off-hours, holidays, or slow times can give managers a headache. The stratustime advanced scheduling module allows you to create and customize shifts and hourly staffing needs, develop templates for the most common weekly schedules, and view employee availability in real time—based on their own reporting of when they’re available. With the module you can also receive instant notifications when employee hours approach their designated limitations.

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Scheduling is a necessary part of your workweek. It is time consuming, but when you take the time to create schedule templates you will save yourself effort later. Each week, you need to enter shifts into the schedule, even when the shifts are virtually the same week after week. However, you know that there’s hardly […]

Scheduling is a necessary part of your workweek. It is time consuming, but when you take the time to create schedule templates you will save yourself effort later. Each week, you need to enter shifts into the schedule, even when the shifts are virtually the same week after week. However, you know that there’s hardly […]

Scheduling is a necessary part of your workweek. It is time consuming, but when you take the time to create schedule templates you will save yourself effort later. Each week, you need to enter shifts into the schedule, even when the shifts are virtually the same week after week. However, you know that there’s hardly […]